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10.13 Disk Utility not showing Partitioning Scheme Options (GUID, MBR, etc.? ) Need Help!

T

timmkroeger

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 8, 2017
6
12
Berlin, Germany
Hi everyone,

long time reader, never posted anything. Couldn't find anything about this anywhere, so I figured this would be the best place.

Just today I came across a weird change in Disk Utitily of High Sierra in comparison to Sierra: when I erase a Volume and set it up as an NTFS partition (I have Paragon NTFS 15 installed), the dialogue used to offer a choice as to what partitioning scheme I want to use (in this case Master Boot record) - this option seems to be gone now.

Instead, the scheme defaults to GUID, which in my case is useless. I need to format the drive in MBR to ensure maximum compatibility (the drive contains a Digital Cinema Package, and I had the best results working with the Master Boot Record scheme in the past in terms of compatibility.) Is there any hidden option I might have missed, or if there isn't: does any of you know if there's a workaround (like a Terminal command to format a drive with MBR?). Any help would be much appreciated!
 
Last edited:
It's not a bug. Disk Utility still offers this option but only if you choose 'Wipe' on physical device rather than volume (which makes perfect sense).

In 10.13 Apple has simplified Disk Utility's view so it only shows volumes (omitting physical devices). Go to 'View' and enable advanced view (I don't remember exact wording). You will notice that physical devices have appeared. Select desired one and then 'Wipe'. You'll notice that partition scheme options are now available.
 
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timmkroeger said:
Hi everyone,

long time reader, never posted anything. Couldn't find anything about this anywhere, so I figured this would be the best place.

Just today I came across a weird change in Disk Utitily of High Sierra in comparison to Sierra: when I erase a Volume and set it up as an NTFS partition (I have Paragon NTFS 15 installed), the dialogue used to offer a choice as to what partitioning scheme I want to use (in this case Master Boot record) - this option seems to be gone now.

Instead, the scheme defaults to GUID, which in my case is useless. I need to format the drive in MBR to ensure maximum compatibility (the drive contains a Digital Cinema Package, and I had the best results working with the Master Boot Record scheme in the past in terms of compatibility.) Is there any hidden option I might have missed, or if there isn't: does any of you know if there's a workaround (like a Terminal command to format a drive with MBR?). Any help would be much appreciated!
Click to expand...


I recently put together a new gaming PC for the first time in several years. This was my first time installing Windows 10, and it turned out to be a bit of a challenge, as I opted to purchase a downloadable copy through Microsoft’s website and transfer it to a USB drive on my Mac running macOS High Sierra. Microsoft provides a tool for creating a bootable Windows 10 installation drive from an existing Windows system, but not for macOS, and there is some conflicting information online about how to go about doing that.

My first instinct was to use dd to copy the ISO to the USB drive (as one typically does when installing a Linux distribution, for example), but it turns out that this does not satisfy the UEFI boot process. After some research and a lot of trial and error, I found that the USB drive must be formatted with a FAT32 partition and the MBR partitioning scheme, after which you can simply mount the Windows 10 ISO in macOS and copy the files to the drive.

Formatting the USB drive can be done from the command-line fairly easily. First, run diskutil list and find the identifier of the USB drive (this will be something like disk2 or disk3; make sure you find the right one, since you could erase the wrong drive and lose data if you don’t use the correct identifier). Next, the following command can be used to format the drive (replace disk# with the actual identifier for your USB drive) and mount it as a volume named WINDOWS10:

diskutil eraseDisk MS-DOS "WINDOWS10" MBR disk#

Now you can mount the Windows 10 ISO by opening it through Finder and copy its contents to the USB drive. Oddly enough, copying the files through Finder did not work for me - I received an error about the files being too large, even though the partition on the drive was definitely big enough, and no individual file appeared to be too large for the FAT32 file system. Eventually I found that using cp from the command-line did work without any issues. When I opened the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update ISO, it mounted as a volume named CCCOMA_X64FRE_EN-US_DV9, so I used the following command to copy its contents to the USB drive:

cp -rp /Volumes/CCCOMA_X64FRE_EN-US_DV9/* /Volumes/WINDOWS10/

This command will take a while, and once it finishes, you can safely eject the drive through Finder and you should be able to boot from it to install Windows 10 on a PC.
 
timmkroeger said:
Hi everyone,

long time reader, never posted anything. Couldn't find anything about this anywhere, so I figured this would be the best place.

Just today I came across a weird change in Disk Utitily of High Sierra in comparison to Sierra: when I erase a Volume and set it up as an NTFS partition (I have Paragon NTFS 15 installed), the dialogue used to offer a choice as to what partitioning scheme I want to use (in this case Master Boot record) - this option seems to be gone now.

Instead, the scheme defaults to GUID, which in my case is useless. I need to format the drive in MBR to ensure maximum compatibility (the drive contains a Digital Cinema Package, and I had the best results working with the Master Boot Record scheme in the past in terms of compatibility.) Is there any hidden option I might have missed, or if there isn't: does any of you know if there's a workaround (like a Terminal command to format a drive with MBR?). Any help would be much appreciated!
Click to expand...
 
Merode said:
It's not a bug. Disk Utility still offers this option but only if you choose 'Wipe' on physical device rather than volume (which makes perfect sense).

In 10.13 Apple has simplified Disk Utility's view so it only shows volumes (omitting physical devices). Go to 'View' and enable advanced view (I don't remember exact wording). You will notice that physical devices have appeared. Select desired one and then 'Wipe'. You'll notice that partition scheme options are now available.
Click to expand...

THANK YOU!!! I spent an hour searching the web for a solution to the greyed out Partition button. Nobody has mentioned this anywhere else. You are a life savior:)
 
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Merode said:
It's not a bug. Disk Utility still offers this option but only if you choose 'Wipe' on physical device rather than volume (which makes perfect sense).

In 10.13 Apple has simplified Disk Utility's view so it only shows volumes (omitting physical devices). Go to 'View' and enable advanced view (I don't remember exact wording). You will notice that physical devices have appeared. Select desired one and then 'Wipe'. You'll notice that partition scheme options are now available.
Click to expand...
[doublepost=1532803670][/doublepost]...good work merode, thank you!
 
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